.. Imagery

Female Purple Finch / Memory is Constructed

Identifying some birds, such as female Finches can be tricky and I am hoping that I got this one right. The Purple Finch has a powerful, conical beak and it feeds on seeds, berries and insects. It breeds in the Northeastern United States.

The Purple Finch is considered a rare bird at the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge during mid summer. When birds are observed in uncommon locations, it makes identification more difficult. Purple Finches and some other seed eating birds have puzzled scientists because they move erratically from year to year - they may end up at different locations during the same seasons. The reason for this behavior is yet to be determined.

Eyewitness Identification is a legal term to denote evidence obtained from a witness "who has actually seen the event". In the recent years, numerous criminal convictions that relied on Eyewitness Evidence have been overturned often as a result of more concrete evidence such as DNA Testing. Memory degrades over time, but it has been shown that:

"Eyewitness memory begins to drop off sharply within 20 minutes following the initial encoding, and continues to do so exponentially until it begins to level off around the second day at a dramatically reduced level of accuracy". *

Photographs, Sound Recorders and Video Recorders can encode short duration events. Even if they are not tampered with, are they capable of capturing context - the complete picture? Much like history, memory is also largely constructed. After all, history is memory.